


Love and Multi-Drive Missiles

by ThirdWavePorrimist



Category: Honor Harrington Series - David Weber
Genre: F/F, Science Girlfriends
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 10:54:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThirdWavePorrimist/pseuds/ThirdWavePorrimist





	1. Meetings

There was a knock at the door.

For a moment, she considered simply ignoring it -- it was too infrequently that she had time to just sit and think, to let the creative juices flow entirely unchecked -- but even on Bolthole, that really wasn't how things were supposed to work, especially when you were an admiral. She scribbled down a note and rose to answer the door.

"Admiral Foraker?" the young man on the other side said briskly after saluting. "A guest to see you from the Manticoran delegation, Ma'am."

Shannon Foraker returned the salute. She was still getting used to the presence of the Star Empire on Bolthole, which so recently had been her domain and hers alone, but outside of that aspect, she had little problem working with Manticorans. After all, Admiral Harrington, who she trusted more than almost anyone (bar Admirals Tourville and Theisman, and Warner Caslet), was Manticoran, and so was her (adorable) 'cat companion.

"Please show her in, Joseph," she said, throwing a glance behind her to see if her office was suitable to receive a guest. It wasn't, of course, but then again she wasn't sure it ever had been.

"Admiral Lady Dame Sonja Hemphill, Baroness Low Delhi," the lieutenant announced, and Admiral Hemphill walked through the door. Shannon knew the name, of course -- she felt, in fact, as if she knew the woman better than she knew any Manticoran but Honor and Nimitz, albeit for different reasons. Sonja Hemphill, Fourth Space Lord, was, in effect, the Star Empire of Manticore's R&D department, and it was her breakthroughs, almost by themselves, that had allowed the Star Empire to push the Republic to the edge of defeat. She was an acknowledged genius, and if the Grand Alliance defeated the Solarians it would be largely thanks to her.

She'd wanted to get into Hemphill's head for absolutely _ages_.

"Admiral," she said, a smile springing to her face, as she offered her hand. The other woman seemed... less intimidating, less larger-than-life, than she'd quite anticipated. It was silly, she knew, but on some level she'd expected Hemphill to be... taller. More imposing. More Honor-like, really.

"Admiral," Hemphill replied, taking the offered hand. "A pleasure to meet you at last, Admiral Foraker. I've wanted to see you for years." She coughed. "To see your work, I mean to say! Or... oh, you know what I mean." She seemed to realize only now that she was supposed to at some point stop shaking Shannon's hand, and dropped it.

Shannon felt a blush sweep over her face; the woman whose breakthroughs had been the cause of every major Manticoran victory had wanted to meet _her_?

"Please," she said, "call me Shannon. We needn't stand on ceremony." _Say it, say it_ , she thought.

"Only if you'll call me Sonja," Hemphill -- Sonja -- said, laughing, and something in Shannon rejoiced. "You wouldn't believe how much of a relief it is to just be able to talk shop! Even in BuWeaps, it's all 'Admiral this' and 'Ma'am that' and everyone's saluting each other, and I can't get through drafting a single blueprint without being hauled off to another meeting!"

"I know!" Shannon exclaimed. "It's a lot better here than some places in the Republic, but there's still so much bureaucracy and formality, and I know it's important, and I know it matters, but I just want to do my research!"

Sonja grinned. "Exactly," she said. "Talking over ideas with someone who really gets it is like drinking a really good Gryphonian brandy after months of nothing but water."

"And we have a great deal to talk about," Shannon replied, and Sonja nodded, her anticipation evident. "I'd particularly like to go over the Apollo and Mistletoe systems, and how we can incorporate them into Havenite missile designs..."

The whole time, Shannon couldn't stop smiling.


	2. Under the Mistletoe

"I'm telling you, Shannon," Sonja Hemphill snapped, "it doesn't work, it can't! We've tried!"  
"No, I know, I know, but what if we stripped it down to just the firing mechanism and the power plant, then slaved it to an Apollo control link?"  
Sonja sighed. "And how, exactly, are you planning to fit the power plant for a grav lance into a missile?" she retorted, then paused and passed a hand over her eyes. "I'm sorry, Shannon, I didn't mean to shout. It's just... I've been trying to find a workable way to deploy the grav lance for literally decades."  
Shannon Foraker smiled apologetically at the woman who, in barely a day, she already called friend. "It's fine," she said lightly. "Still, though, fresh pair of eyes never hurts."  
Sonja nodded. "True enough. But the power plant problem really is insurmountable. Even with the best miniaturization we have, you need very nearly a cruiser's reactor throughput to give a grav lance enough punch to knock out the sidewall of anything bigger than an LAC." She waved a hand at the blueprints that, by now, completely covered Admiral Foraker's desk and indeed virtually every flat surface in the office. "Either you don't put in a powerful enough reactor--"  
"--or you're basically sticking a light cruiser's fusion bottle in every grav missile you fire," Shannon completed. "Which I agree is out of the question. It just seems so, I don't know, like giving up, to abandon the grav lance idea when it's so close to being a gamechanger on the scale of Apollo or the podnaughts."  
"I know exactly the feeling," Sonja replied heavily. "It worked in Basilisk, but we can't count on every light cruiser captain being a Harrington." Shannon nodded, a smile coming to her face as she thought of Honor and how dazzling she'd always found the other woman's tactics -- even, or perhaps especially, when she was on the receiving end.  
Her reverie ended abruptly as she caught an odd look in Sonja's eyes. If Shannon hadn't known better she'd have called it jealousy, but there was nothing to be jealous over; they were simply talking of a mutual acquaintance. The look on Sonja's face recalled her to the present, though, and she swiftly returned to the topic at hand. "The mass is the insurmountable barrier," she mused. "Too much and it's a sitting duck for point defense, too little and it can't do its job..." Finally she let her shoulders slump. "And I can't think of a single damned way to balance them without ending up with the worst of both worlds."  
Sonja let out what would, in a woman of less inherent dignity, have been a giggle. "Shannon," she reminded her friend, "you've been thinking this through for all of a day! I've had twenty years and I still don't have any solutions." She glanced at the time readout on the wall panel. "I introduced you to the modernized grav lance model barely seven hours ago, and--" The rest of the sentence trailed off as a thought intruded on her.  
"We forgot to have lunch, didn't we," Shannon said, reaching the same conclusion at almost exactly the same instant.  
"Yes," Sonja replied, without a hint of regret. "I suppose we should head to the mess, though."  
Shannon shook her head, setting her bangs gently swaying. "No need," she said brightly. "This is what we have a steward for, right? We can make it a working lunch." She tapped the call button, looking around for somewhere to sit.  
The door opened. "Ma'am?" the young petty officer said, glancing at the mass of blueprints that had once been an office.  
"Joseph," said Shannon, "do you think we could get some lunch for Admiral Hemphill and I up here? We rather lost track of time, you see..."  
"Of course, Ma'am," he replied at once. "The usual?"  
"Please," she said, smiling. "And some coffee for the admiral, I think." Sonja nodded her thanks.  
"I'll send for the steward and have that up here in a moment," Joseph said, and departed. Shannon returned to her search, and--  
There! Triumphant, she picked up, from between a pair of cabinets, a few technical manuals on graser design and a textbook or two on gamma-ray theory, setting them down unceremoniously on the one heretofore unoccupied chair. There was still a blueprint stretching across the gap, but she wasn't inclined to move anything important, so it could stay. At that moment, Joseph arrived with two trays of what Shannon was fairly certain was probably quite exquisite food -- she'd never been much of a gourmet, but the food he brought her always tasted good and refreshed her, which was the important thing.  
 _He must have had those waiting for me to ask for them,_ she thought. _He couldn't have had them whipped up that quickly._ She smiled her thanks, and as he left Sonja murmured her own.  
Shannon gestured to the space she'd created between cabinets, and, grabbing one of the trays, sat down to eat. Sonja, her eyes twinkling, joined her, and the two admirals ate lunch there, for all the world like a pair of undergraduates grabbing a bite in the middle of the library. They chatted as they ate, mostly about blue-sky research they both longed to conduct, though decades of war had robbed them of that chance.  
At last a lull came to the conversation -- both women had finished eating several minutes earlier, but the discussion had proceeded nonetheless -- and Shannon, sighing happily, leant back, gazing at the ceiling of blueprints above them. _Remote_ _platform_ , she read, and _laser warhead_ , and _infrastructure targeting_ \--  
She froze as she realized exactly what blueprint she was sitting under.  
This was far, far too good an opportunity to waste.  
"Sonja?" she said calmly.  
The other woman turned her head towards Shannon, and Shannon seized the moment.  
She kissed her.  
She felt Sonja's lips against hers, not returning yet not repelling, as she reveled for that brief moment in the sensation -- and then, half a heartbeat after she'd held it too long, she broke the kiss and opened her eyes.  
Sonja was staring at her, wide-eyed, her golden hair framing her face and setting off the blush that had sprang to her cheeks. "Shannon..." she said, carefully. "What--"  
Shannon was acutely aware that she was blushing as well. "Well," she said, far more breezily than she felt, "it's a tradition, isn't it?"  
The blush dropped from Sonja's cheeks as she stared at the younger woman in confusion. "Tradition?" she said, in a voice shot through with dubiousness.  
"Of course!" Shannon exclaimed. "After all," she said, gesturing to the blueprint above them, "we're under the Mistletoe."  
She tried to keep the grin off her face. She failed rather completely.  
Sonja held the gaze for several seconds, then her eyes narrowed. "All right, Admiral Foraker," she said quietly, and Shannon's heart twitched sideways in her chest at her return to the formality of their introduction, "you want to play it that way? We'll play that way." And with that she seized the nearest blueprint and, rolling it up, started trying to thwack Shannon on the head with it, prompting a rather fruitless defense, and within moments both women were laughing uncontrollably.  
Petty Officer 2nd Class Joseph Fenwick heard the commotion and, wondering if his assistance was required, opened the door.  
He saw Vice Admiral Foraker being chased around her own office by Admiral Lady Dame Hemphill, who was brandishing a blueprint at her.  
He closed the door, deciding that he was entirely better off not knowing.  
In the office, the laughter finally subsided. Sonja glanced across the desk at her Havenite opposite number.  
"I know that wasn't just for the sake of a pun, Shannon," she said, just failing to meet her eyes. "What, exactly..." She trailed off into silence, but both women knew what question had been asked.  
"I think," Shannon replied after a pause that felt horribly long, "that an Admiral of the Red ought to be able to solve a tactical problem like that, don't you?" And without giving Sonja a chance to even begin thinking of an answer to that, she smiled brightly, if not entirely sincerely, and added, "Now! Back to the drawing board. It occured to me that even if missiles aren't practical, we could at least consider an LAC mount--"  
"Well, perhaps, but by the time we're talking about a ship that carries battlecruiser-grade grasers at point-blank it's almost superfluous--"  
Through all of it, despite the sheer volume of thought experiments and design sketches they produced that evening, Shannon couldn't quite stop thinking about how Sonja's lips had felt.


End file.
